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Sunday, 26 October 2014

bratislava.

We set off on the next leg of our journey - from Vienna to Bratislava - on a coach with really good wifi, so I could catch up with my friends and fam back home! The journey was beautiful and peaceful, and we saw SO many swallows on the way!

When we got to Hostel Blues, we were greeted by such a helpful guy! He recommended so many awesome places to us, and gave us a little list of local foods to try. After dropping off our bags we headed out for some lunch at Slovak Pub, where I had a traditional meal of potato dumplings - which had a similar texture to gnocci - and spicy sausage. It was really nice, but I recommend going for a half portion if you can!

Afterwards, we wandered around up and down the beautiful cobbled streets. We totally fell in love with the old town, and decided it looked like somewhere out of a storybook. It's just so cute.

Up the hill to the castle, which wasn't so interesting - just a big white box basically - but the views across the river to the concrete jungle contrasting with the red roofs of the old town were great. Back down the hill to a bar called Le Senk for craft beers - very yummy!

We explored a bit more & found the Church of St. Elisabeth, or you might know it as the blue church. Both the exterior and interior are pastel blue - it looks a bit like it might just be a giant cake. In contrast to such a pretty building, we headed north to look at a couple of communist structures which made my eyes feel sad because they were SO ugly.

The guy at the hostel tipped us off about a vegan festival, so we went there for dinner. They were playing amazing music and there were loads of young, cool-looking people there having fun times. We didn't really know what any of the food was, but whatever we ate was really yummy!

We headed back into old town to a bar called Kontakt, which was also really cool. We tried a local spirit called Borovicka, which supposedly tastes like gin, but I didn't think it did. We watched a bit of the Slovakian folk festival and then headed back to the hostel as there were quite a lot of dodgy looking people around that put me on edge, especially as one of our friends had something stolen when he was there.

Bratislava truly exceeded our expectations, and I would recommend it to everyone! It is very small though, so it's probably not worth staying longer than one or two nights.

If I sort out my credit card problems, I might visit Bratislava in December. Hopefully it snows but it will probably be freezing as in "Winter is coming" cold... Anyway, do you think it's not a safe place to go on my own? What about transportation, is it complicated to get a train/bus to Vienna? And the airport-city center route? Sorry about so many questions! Nice photos, the food looks yummy and it seems to me that it might be an affordable country. xx

I think you'd be safe - definitely in the daytime at least! Just keep your wits about you in the evening as there are quite a lot of pickpockets. We got the bus from Vienna to Bratislava & it was really easy and quick. You can book online beforehand. We didn't fly to/from Bratislava so I don't know about the airport route xx